The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its State of the News Media 2009 report. It features a mini-analysis of the economics of online advertising for news organizations and it doesn’t make encouraging reading. In particular:

Even before the financial credit crisis hit in September, Veronis Suhler Stevenson projected that for the two online ad categories most oriented to news, display and classified, spending would reach $16 billion by 2012. If news sites represented 20% of that, it would amount to roughly $3 billion, or less than one tenth of what newspapers alone took in during 2008.

It’s all very well for new media pundits to tell news organizations to trim their operations to sizes that can be supported by new media revenues but as a society can we really afford to lose 90% of newspaper journalists?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under mass media, political economy of the Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.